Hello everyone, welcome to this week's progress report.
Level:
We have continued working on the detail meshes for Apoc and have started the next phase for Umbar, creating a tile set for all buildings. In parallel, we’ve been testing our foliage production tools, focusing on mesh creation and wind animation. On the other side, we’ve completed a major update to our landscape material. Our current focus now is on improving textures and refining the terrain mesh itself.
Code:Here in the coding den, we resolved a bunch of issues that came up during testing. E.g. NPCs not being interactable and just standing around after sleeping, projectiles hitting light foliage, missing crosshair after switching player, among other things.
We also implemented one of the improvements we have planned for the combat; using Exhaust as more of a resource, where dodges and special attacks build exhaust, while light attacks reduce it. This is meant to entice the use of different attack types during a fight.
It's been a long time coming; we have started work on a customizable Tattoo/Skin marking system! You will be able to layer as many tattoos as you want in the sandbox, including custom external ones. This system will also be used in story mode, but there it will be limited to one tattoo per body slot (Upper Arm, Lower arm, Leg, Back, Face etc).
Character:This week, we finally got to tackle the “eyebrow issue” where sometimes, depending on character and skin texture combination you would see an additional set of eyebrows which are painted on the skin texture itself and don't align with the eyebrow mesh. Our solution was to remove the painted eyebrows from the skin textures and add a secondary mesh to the characters to improve the eyebrow rendering and fix those gaps and holes between the brow hair meshes where you could see too much skin below.
Additionally, we started work on one of the planned ambient creatures. This cute alien crab will wander the beach regions of Kerpal.
Animations: In the animation department, we reached a big milestone this week: All character skeletons can now use the melee weapons they will need in the story mode. This means Game Design is now free to not only give every NPC their signature weapon, but also to create all sorts of humanoid enemies: Claw-wielding cannibals, goatmen with daggers, bull bandits with great axes, lizards with twinblades and many more combinations are now possible.
In addition to this, we worked on item use animations, such as eating food or drinking potions, and on some more routines for the lizards in Adûn.
Design:We have worked on quests and dialogues in Lake Village, Warrior Village and Alpha Camp. New quests and characters have been added. Most characters got new dialogue options. Existing quests have been improved on, e.g. the information the player gathers for Fox about the Kerpali has been spread out to more characters. Elber doesn't get killed by Lizards before the player finds him at the pod anymore. Max has to gain the respect of the Warriors before he can do his initiation, etc.
The dialogues will now be handed over to our writer to improve the choice of words and make it sound more natural.
Thank you for all your continued support,
-Wild Life Team
